Will blinks. “I’mwhat?”
“Forget it.” She waves him off, then offers her hand. “Lilly Benedetto.”
There’s something familiar about it, though it could just be that everyone he’s met out here has a fake-sounding name, likethey all were invented by Aaron Sorkin for a network pilot about young, earnest civil rights lawyers. “Will Darcy,” he says as they shake.
Lilly nods. “So, Will Darcy,” she says, taking a sip of her cocktail, “what are you doing in LA?”
“That... is a great question,” he admits, tilting his head back against a faux-Doric pillar. Suddenly his name sounds fake, too. “Making an ass of myself, probably.”
“Oh, we can’t get enough of that here.”
“You know, I am getting that impression.” He smiles. “What about you, what do you do?”
Lilly’s eyes narrow just for a moment, and right away Will feels like a twerp. Charlie and Caroline are always giving him shit about how he has zero pop culture competence; he once sat next to Jay-Z on the 2 train in New York and had no idea why everyone was pointing their phones in his direction until some little kid in a school uniform clued him in at Grand Army Plaza. Lilly probably won an Academy Award for Best Actress last year while he was sitting in his apartment like an ascetic, readingNo Exitfor the sixteenth time. Still, Will thinks, this is exactly why he hates Los Angeles. Everyone who lives here always thinks they’re the most important person in the room, and screw you if you don’t fall all over yourself with fear and trembling. “Sorry,” he amends grudgingly. “Should I know—?”
“No, no.” Lilly’s expression clears then; she holds her hand up in sheepish surrender. “I just—sorry. I’m a writer.”
“What do you write?”
“None of your business.”
“How’s it going?”
“Not great.”
“Writer’s block?” he guesses, taking a step. Every instinct he’s got is telling him to go home to the safe, anonymous quiet of Charlie’s janky rental house and hole up with his script like he planned when he ducked out here in the first place, but for some reason that eludes all understanding, he can’t seem to make himself say good night. There’s something about this woman that makes him want to stay a little longer. There’s something about her that makes him want to break his own rules. “Creative ennui? Paralyzing fear of being unadulterated shit at the thing you want to do most in the entire world?”
That makes her smile. “Exactly.”
Will nods. Fear, he’s familiar with. Fear, he understands. Fear, if he’s being honest with himself, is what landed him on a seventy-two-hour emergency psych hold at Lenox Hill, his throat red and raw from the charcoal, though that doesn’t feel like the exact right anecdote to share at this particular moment. “Well,” he says finally. “Screw your courage to the sticking place, et cetera.”
“That’s very wise,” Lilly says seriously. “Is it the lyric of a Sara Bareilles song?”
“Back of a Chipotle bag.”
Lilly smiles at that, the hint of a dimple appearing at one corner of her full red lips. “What about you, huh?” she asks. “What do you do?”
“I’m an actor,” he tells her. “Theoretically.”
“Huh,” she says, like that’s not what she was expecting. They’ve drifted closer now, the warmth of her thigh bleeding straight through his dress pants. “Say more about that.”
“You know,” he says, “I don’t think I will.”
Both of them are quiet for a moment. Will keeps on looking ather mouth. When he leans it’s without ever quite deciding he’s going to do it: their noses brushing, their foreheads millimeters apart. He’s already closing his eyes when suddenly Lilly puts a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
Will backs off almost before she gets the word out, pulling away so fast and hard he nearly winds up smashed like a watermelon at the bottom of the staircase. “Sorry,” he says immediately, feeling his entire body prickle with horror. What the fuck was he thinking? This is how people wind up getting investigated by Ronan Farrow. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No, no, no,” Lilly interrupts. “You’re fine, I just mean—” She glances over her shoulder. “Not, like, here.” She takes him by the hand before he can put a reply together, then pulls him down the wide granite steps and into the hedge maze, turning left and right and left again until Will is fairly certain he’ll never be able to make it back out on his own. Her smile, when at last she stops and turns to face him, is like a slice of moonlight in the dark.
“Okay,” she says decisively. “That’s better.”
Will lifts an eyebrow. “Better for what, exactly?”
“Oh please,” Lilly shoots back, all confidence. “Don’t act for one second like you weren’t about to—”
Will kisses her.
She kisses him back, thank god, her hands fluttering for a moment before fisting in his jacket, yanking him closer. Will breathes a quiet sound against her mouth. His palms skate up her rib cage, learning the dramatic S curve of her body; his thumb traces the underside of her breast through the fabric, and Lilly gasps.
